Dawn redwood needles turning brown in summer

I have several small Dawn redwood trees in my yard. These trees normally shed their needles in the fall, and are bare in the winter. On both of my trees, they are showing more and more brown needles, and it's not even August yet. I'm my area, we've had more than average rainfall (not flooding like many nearby), but from what I understand, these trees are ok with a lot of moisture. I thought maybe Japanese beetles may have been causing them to brown, but I've been keeping them off the trees with traps.

Anybody have any ideas why they are browning already? I can't see any visible disease on the trees, just the leaves turning brown. See attached pictures.

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They are one of the few conifer's that exhibit deciduous characteristics, specifically browning out in winter, which is of course perfectly normal for that peculiar species. Metasequoia glyptostroboides.

Get your tongue around that if yu can, and relax, at least until next spring.

Ent's are contemptuous of hasty humans with reason, from their point of view.

I don't know about you, but down here we're DRY. We got a week of rain last week and the ground drank it up as if it were the Sahara.
Even now, the ditches are all dry, and in a normal year, there would be a foot or two of water in the ditches after that much rain.

Canyon Angler - we've had a ton of rain this year, then some very hot, dry weather, where the ground was showing cracks. I put some mulch down around the trunk since seeing the browning going on (even though when I felt the ground around the trunk, the soil was still somewhat moist). What's odd is that the browning is occurring not at the end of branches, but maybe halfway out the branch. I would have thought the browning would start at the extremities first, if the tree was dying; so I guess that's a good thing?